4&20 blackbirds

Bradley Manning Guilty of Espionage

I put “Bradley Manning” into the old search engine, and here are the first headlines:

Acquitted of aiding the enemy… (CBS)Found not guilty of aiding the enemy… (Washington Post)Acquitted of aiding the enemy, still may face long jail term… (Chicago Tribune)Found not guilty of aiding the enemy… (CNN)

The California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence issues, was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department to drop espionage charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington.

Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.

In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.

Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to, according to an official who read the NSA transcript, Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”…

Bradley Manning sacrificed his freedom to push a conversation about America’s destructive role on the world stage into existence. At the very least, what we owe Manning, and all the other courageous whistle blowers, is to pay attention.

The Security State is no longer bound by the laws and Constitution of the U.S. I’m most curious about what happens when people finally accept the fact that Google, Facebook, ATT, Verizon, Apple, Yahoo et al. have been in bed with NSA all along. Or, is freedom unimportant to social-media-consumer-people.

A commenter over at Naked Capitalism said that Manning was not a criminal but a witness to a crime. He reported it to the American people. So if the government is saying he aided the enemy, the enemy has to be us, the American citizenry.

I haven’t been paying close enough attention to the Manning affair, but I haven’t heard yet what actual damage his disclosures may have caused. Has anyone died as a result of these disclosures? Or has he merely embarrassed some very important people?

I didn’t realize, until listening to Democracy Now yesterday, that the sentencing process, in this type of proceeding, can include new information. there will apparently be witnesses discussing the lack of damage in addition to Manning’s motivation, two things that weren’t allowed in the actual trial.

So who’s the criminal here? The Army and it’s team of collateral murderers leaving swaths of innocent dead civilians in its wake? Or the private who thought the world needed to see what was being whitewashed, and disclosed the bloodlust of American “soldiers”, and then was tortured enhanced interrogated and placed in solitary for months about it?